GOLDSTEIN: The Israel-Hamas war will end – the anti-Semitism won’t

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Now that the evil of the world’s oldest form of hatred – anti-Semitism – has been on full display across Canada for months, what will happen when the latest war between Hamas and Israel in Gaza is over?

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The answer is that regardless of when the conflicts ends – and as hard as it may be to imagine it will end – the heightened level of Jew hatred it generated in Canada isn’t going to go away.

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As a result, many Jews living in places like Toronto with a high concentration of Jews, will never look at their city in the same way again.

There have been four previous Israel-Hamas confrontations in the modern era, but while all were accompanied by an increase in anti-Semitism in Canada, the amount and intensity of it on open display has never reached its current levels.

Not this amount of hatred in the form of firebombing Jewish gathering places, shooting bullets at Jewish schools, torching and vandalizing Jewish-owned businesses, painting Swastikas on synagogues and Jewish homes and organizing protests that deliberately target Jewish neighbourhoods, describing them in one case as a “Zionist-infested area.”

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Never before have police in Toronto, for example, felt it necessary to set up command posts in Jewish neighborhoods in the city, which have been there ever since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct 7 when Hamas launched its terrorist attack on Israel and which show no signs of being removed anytime soon.

Part of the reason for this explosion of anti-Semitism is due to the fact this fifth confrontation between Hamas and Israel in the modern era has been far more deadly than the previous ones, but there are other factors at play here as well.

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The open Jew hatred on display at many universities across Canada – and for that matter North America – has been fuelled by years of so-called “Israel Apartheid Week” campaigns, which actually started at the University of Toronto, along with the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which similarly seeks to demonize and delegitimize the world’s only Jewish state.

They’ve provided a twisted form of academic legitimacy for Jew hatred, which cowardly university administrators have ignored for a generation – and which is not going to go back in the bottle once a temporary ceasefire in the Hamas Israel war is achieved, because all ceasefires in this conflict are temporary.

Not when presidents of three of America’s most prestigious universities, when asked if calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their campus codes of conduct, couldn’t come up with a straight answer, retreating into a legalistic argument of “it depends.”

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As for the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it’s always been more comfortable denouncing hatred coming from the far right than the far left.

In addition, the fact that according to the 2021 census there are 1.8 million Muslims living in Canada today, compared to 335,000 Jews, will always be on the minds of vote-counting politicians when it comes to commenting on what’s going on in the Mideast and Canada going forward.

Especially when it comes to simultaneously denouncing Islamophobia whenever they mention anti-Semitism, when the reality is that while both forms of hatred are repugnant and should be publicly denounced, it isn’t demonstrators who support Israel deliberately targeting Muslim neighbourhoods with marches publicly proclaiming messages of hate.

The war will end but the memory of those images won’t.

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